By now, anyone who has a TV or computer has seen
appalling scenes of farm cruelty against chickens, turkeys, calves, cows and
pigs. Are conditions as bad as the activists say or do they have an "agenda" which
is to make people go vegetarian?

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Sadly, US commercial farms are as bad as they
say and many reporters have exposed the same conditions.

In 2004, the Chicago
Tribune's Andrew Martin reported that "dozens of dead piglets are
dumped in piles or encased in pools of manure beneath the floor, having drowned
there after falling through a hole," as he visited the HKY Farm in
Bloomfield, NE. "Dead hogs remain in their cages, discarded and stiff in
walkways or rotting in pens as other pigs gnaw at their carcasses. Many of the
1,800 or so pigs that are alive are emaciated, crippled or covered with open
sores, having been poked by jagged iron bars from broken cages or fallen
through slats that separate them from the manure pits below," he wrote.

Then, Rolling
Stone ran an expose about Smithfield hog operations called, "Boss
Hog," two years later with a photo of a mountain of dead, pink pigs
looking eerily like children."

The liquid in the infamous the "holding
ponds" of manure, is not brown, says author, Jeff Tietz. "The
interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn
piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons
pink," he writes. "Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow;
major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-sh** bayous. To
alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the sh** out of them and
spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry
daintily refers to as 'overapplication.' This can turn hundreds of acres--
thousands of football fields--into shallow mud puddles of pig sh**. Tree
branches drip with pig sh**."

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Meanwhile, National Public Radio contributor
Daniel Zwerdling gave graphic coverage of chicken slaughter for the now defunct
Gourmet magazine, almost unprecedented
in a foodie magazine, including the one million birds a year that the chicken
industry admits are boiled alive
because they miss the stunner.

Revelations of cruelty can have immediate, viral
results. Food giants often suspend the suppliers caught red-handed. Yet until prosecuting
attorneys take charges against animals and specifically food animals seriously the
cruelty will continue.

Martha Rosenberg is an award-winning investigative public health reporter who covers the food, drug and gun industries. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, is distributed by Random (more...)